2014 James “Jake” Cranage Poetry Award
Manmade
by Sydney Doyle
My grandmother announced she hated winter
as Stephanie, from The Weather Channel,
waved in bright blue splotches on the radar
and advised morning commuters
to break out the ice scrapers.
“Your grandfather was overnight snow flurry.
Unnoticed, he accumulated into
sight. Silently, he thawed into ground.”
If so, she was an explosion.
She was streaks of blue and red.
Her spine: curved, bent into a bowling ball on a bumpered lane
into sky.
She burned, ceaselessly in a beam of light
screaming and sparkling,
spilling ash and torch on anyone behind.
“I am dying, and they are eating,
potato salad and coleslaw.”
What could she do
but be bright and make noise?
Nobody ever called her eyes stars; they are
manmade. Her black satin slippers, her cigarettes and the accompanied
cough, her change-purse and checks, the daydreams of cruise ships
are all manmade.
She is an explosion, transient, a second in vision,
a shatter in eardrums,
an afterglow in blinking eyes.
Fast, bright, bang, and nothing.
And when she discovered fire at her fingertips
she must have used it to cauterize
cartilage, joints, arteries, synapses,
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